We should feel inclined to apologize to our readers for again introducing the English Establishment to their notice, were it not that since, a year ago, we considered Anglicanism in connection with the “Old Catholic” conference at Bonn, the increasing agitation within the state church cannot but have continued to attract the thoughtful attention of those who, from the bark of Peter, watch the weary tossing of the Anglican craft and the mutinous condition of a portion of her crew.
Since the period to which we allude, the fact that the whole tendency of the Alt-Catholic movement is rationalistic and anti-Christian is beginning to be understood by all really religious Protestants, and we now see the better part of them holding aloof from the movement, and even the Ritualist journals condemning whatever advances were made towards it. The cause is now advocated only by the Broad-Church party, which distinguished itself by its emphatic encouragement of the apostate Loyson, one of the apostles of the new sect, who went last summer to London to enlighten the English public on ecclesiastical questions. On the other hand, the High-Church movement is, if anything, in the direction of the Catholic Church, while Alt-Catholicism is a distinct counter-agitation, and thus anything like a cordial fraternization between the two is impossible. The attempts of the High-Church party to obtain at least as much as a recognition of the validity of their orders from the Orientals—attempts which were renewed at the Bonn conference—have again signally failed. One of the “Unionist” leaders himself laments that “the Oriental Church stands entirely aloof from the Church of England, sweepingly and roundly condemns all its members, denies the validity of their baptisms and ordinations, and practically refuses to aid them in any shape or form.”
There is no doubt that at the present moment a tremendous struggle has arisen in the Establishment between the would-be Catholic and the Protestant elements; the latter not only pleading its three centuries’ possession, but also, and truly, declaring itself to be the very basis and raison d’être of the schism. This claim is urged at the present time with a vehemence and jealous irritation aimed ostensibly at the “Romanizing practices” of their brethren, but the venom of which betrays itself to be especially called forth by the ceaseless, active, self-denying energy of these incorrigible early risers—an irritation not difficult to comprehend on the part of those who, with all their professions of Evangelical piety, have, generally speaking, an exceeding shyness of hard work, detest the Counsels of Perfection in general and the practice of self-denial in particular, take up the pen much more readily than the cross, and prefer bridling their neighbor’s tongue rather than their own. Nevertheless, with regard to a certain class among the Evangelicals, and these the more earnest, it is only just to say that their condemnation of Ritualists and their practices is sincerely a matter of principle. They regard the one as the guides and the other as the direct means to “idolatry”—a term which they have all their lives been taught to consider as synonymous with the Catholic religion.
When St. Edward the Confessor lay on his death-bed in the palace of Westminster, he foretold to his queen, St. Edith, and to Stigand that, in punishment for the sins of the land, God would permit the enemy of mankind to send a mission of wicked spirits into it, who should sever the Green Tree of Old England from its root, and lay it apart for the space of three furlongs; but that the tree should after a due time return to its root and revive, without the help of any man’s hand. The traditional interpretation of this prophecy has been that the English Church would be cut off for the space of three centuries from its parent stem, but that, after that time, the severed church should return to its ancient allegiance.
And what do we now see? Movement, awakening, and life where for three centuries have reigned the gloom and chillness of the tomb.
From the time of Elizabeth downwards not only the teaching but the general aspect of what is called the Church of England was intensely anti-Catholic. A brighter day first dawned for England when she hospitably received and succored the exiled priests of France. The precious leaven of their holy teaching and example never has been lost. Later, in 1829, the emancipation of the Catholics of the British Empire, under George IV., marked a fresh epoch in the history of the Catholic Church in England. The discussions which attended the passing of this act helped to increase a knowledge of her tenets, and prepared the way for their better appreciation; besides which, the restoration of some of the most illustrious families of the realm to their ancient and hereditary seats in the House of Lords, together with the admission of Catholics into the Lower House, tended further to the removal of many prejudices. Since Newman and Pusey, in 1833, recalled their brethren to the study of the Fathers of the church, many steps have been taken in the Establishment in the direction of the ancient paths—steps which Catholics have noted with interest and hope, though they perceive that but too often men who have been attracted towards the truth rest apparently contented with a bad imitation of its external manifestations and a garbled or “adapted” representation of its doctrines, forgetting that truth distorted ceases to be truth, and often is a lie. They marvel also that the invariable opposition of the pseudo-episcopate does not help these men, who are the present life of their system, to see that their imaginary “Catholicity” is wholly unauthorized and unrecognized by their ecclesiastical superiors, and that the hierarchy of their church is as consistently and persistently anti-Catholic as the constitution of that body itself. They are resisted and condemned by their bishops, and from their bishops they have no appeal except to a lay tribunal whose interference in sacris they repudiate.
By the terms of a new Appellate Jurisdiction Act, recently passed in both Houses of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council has been transferred to a new Court of Appeal. It was then provided that episcopal assessors should in future sit on the bench with the lay judges; and though it is by the latter that the judgment is pronounced, the bishops are allowed to make remarks on what is passing. They are to sit in rotation in the new court. The two archbishops and the Bishop of London are also to sit in turn, ex officio, and the rest in quarternions, beginning with the junior four (Chichester, St. Asaph, Ely, and St. David’s). It is impossible to say what may be the results of this equivocal assessorship, with regard to which the London Morning Post disrespectfully observes that “the plan offers no security whatever that the assessors shall be fit for their office beyond the fact that they are bishops”; calmly adding that “since the purpose for which their presence is required is the imparting to the judges of a certain kind and quality of information when desired, it is a serious defect to the scheme that it provides no guarantee that the prelates who sit shall possess any proper aptitude for their position.”[[21]]
Upon this another journal asks: If it be true that Anglican bishops are corporately incompetent as advisers of lay judges, even on the doctrines of their own particular communion, of what use are they at all? If they cannot, without the aid of civilians, interpret the Articles, why not make bishops of the lay judges, instead of paying thousands a year to each of these gentlemen, who do not apparently know their own business? In any case, how Ritualists can remain, with satisfaction to their consciences, in a communion whose highest arbiter is not even a sub-deacon, is perplexing to any one who regards the church as a divinely-instituted system. We have been reminded by Presbyter Anglicanus that it is a necessary ingredient in any system of discipline that the superior should not be judged by the inferior, the teacher by the taught; and that the twelfth canon of the African Code ordains that, “if a bishop fall under the imputation of any crime, he shall have a second hearing before twelve bishops, if more cannot be had; a priest before six, with his own bishop; a deacon before three—according to the statutes of the ancient canons.” Again: “It was a recognized principle in the primitive church that the deposition of an ecclesiastic required the intervention of more bishops than were needed for his ordination. The Anglican bishops notwithstanding their professions of regard for the primitive church, are content that a presbyter, ordained and instituted by a 'bishop,’ should be deprived by a layman. And they talk of apostolic order!”
The writer just quoted, who is now safe in the Catholic Church, described, just before his conversion, the present condition of ecclesiastical discipline in the Anglican Church as follows: “The ecclesiastical courts which survived the Reformation and the great rebellion have been ... abolished; the bishop of each diocese has ceased to be the ordinary of that diocese, and the whole clergy of the Church of England are rendered amenable to, and are even directed in their conduct of public worship by, a layman, whose office has been created in the year of grace 1874 by the imperial Parliament, and who, besides playing the part of a pseudo-dean of the Arches and principal of the Provincial Court of York, is also to be the national ordinary, the Parliamentary vicar-general of the Establishment, exercising jurisdiction in every parish from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Channel Islands.” And this is the system to which unquestioning, unrepining, absolute submission is required of the clergy by the bishops of the Anglican communion.
Nor is this all; not only is it now the case that secular law courts decide what may or may not be taught and practised in the Anglican Church, but they also claim to decide who shall and who shall not be admitted to its rites and sacraments. Lawyers are thus not only the doctors and ceremoniarii of Anglicanism, suspending or depriving ecclesiastics at pleasure, but they are also to be, in the last resort, the stewards of Anglican sacraments.